Misinterpreting The Behavior Of A Mexican American Child By Diana Drake

My first years going to an American school were very challenging because I didn’t know how to speak English. Everything else was different too; the school, the classrooms, the students, the rules, the food, just everything. It was a totally new culture I had to adapt to in order to fit in with the rest. Diana Drake emphasizes, “If an Anglo teacher is unaware that children growing up in different cultures may learn different values and may learn to attach different meanings to particular behaviors, the teacher may grossly misinterpret the behavior of a Mexican American child” (100). Drake gives an example of what she means by “misinterpreting the behavior of a Mexican American child” by stating, “If a Chicano child has learned to convey respect by looking down when being reprimanded by an adult, an Anglo teacher who is incentive to cultural differences may force that child to behave in what the child considers an improper and disrespectful manner” (100). …show more content…
Learned as a mandatory behavior to show respect in Mexico, in the United States, it may be perceived as disrespectful and indicative of guilt” (Mont-Cors, 2008, Respect for elders). I can really relate to this because I seemed to be intimidated by everyone around me because I wasn’t used to the American culture. This is when I started to notice more and more differences from my previous years in my Mexican school. The biggest I thought was definitely the classrooms. Here it was amazing for me to be in just one classroom with classmates all of the same grade instead like in Mexico that it was one classroom for a whole set of grade school years. It felt good in a way to be in a classroom filled with students my age and having a colorful classroom with posters and learning essentials